Article March 21, 1903 Issue

Religious Items

with contributions from James H. Ecob, W. W. Fenn, Henry Drummond, George Bowen

There is one sure way to find out God's method for any coming world: it is to study His method with us in this world. What is that method? Always away from things to thoughts, away from sensations to sentiments and convictions. The child begins life wholly immersed in the physical and material. But every hour of his existence points him steadily onward to the unseen spiritual life. At first he is noisy and busy, his hands full of toys. After a time we find him sitting silent by the hour with a book in his hand. He has advanced to another world, the world of thought and feeling. Just in proportion as one has freed himself from the influence of the material and lives in the invisible world of affection and imagination and truth, we call him an educated, cultivated, well-disciplined man. In this direction lies all true greatness. Now in precisely this line proceeds the curriculum of the Bible for spiritual education. This word finds us immersed in the temporal and earthly. It says: I must awake this sense of the eternal, the spiritual. They must be made conscious of their true life. So all the mere attendants or conditions of life are steadily, consistently depreciated, and life itself is exalted. "Your life consisteth not in the abundance of things which you possess. The life is more than food and raiment. Your life is hid with Christ in God. The kingdom of God is not meat and drink, but righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost. This is eternal life,—to know God and Jesus Christ whom he has sent. What shall it profit a man though he gain the whole world and lose his life? What shall a man give in exchange for his life? The fashion of the world passeth away, but he that doeth the will of God abideth forever." "I am come that ye might have life, and that ye might have it more abundantly." Now where this consciousness of spiritual eternal life is once kindled in a soul, the one overmastering revelation is made. To that soul "life and immortality are brought to light."

James H. Ecob, D.D
In The Christian Register.

Rev. A. Depledge-Sykes, pastor of a large Congregationalist Church in London, in a sermon speaks thus:—

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